Adjustable volumetric measuring utensils, principally in the form of measuring spoons having a back wall that can be moved to various locations along a channel of uniform cross-sectional profile and cylindrical measuring cups having a tight fitting, vertically adjustable floor are well known, but all have significant drawbacks. Chief among these is a severe practical limitation on the range of measurements a given utensil can accurately make. Often a recipe will call for two or more cups of a main ingredient such as flour or sugar and an eighth of a teaspoon of salt or a potent spice, amounts differing in volume, in this instance, by a factor of seven hundred and sixty-eight. If one wished to extend the functionality of an adjustable measuring spoon of known type that was originally designed to hold, at its lowest setting, an eighth of a teaspoon in a channel-shaped bowl an eighth of an inch long—by expanding its length so that it could also measure two cups—the bowl at its maximum setting would need to be eight feet long! On the other hand, even a very tall and narrow, one and three-quarter inch diameter, cylindrical adjustable measuring cup, one capable of measuring two cups at an overly generous depth of twelve inches, would require, for measuring an eighth of a teaspoon, that the height of the cylinder, from floor to rim, be reduced to one sixty-fourth of an inch, roughly the thickness of a playing card.
In both of their generic forms, known adjustable volumetric measuring utensils have intractable inherent limitations stemming from the mathematical fact that a series of enlargements or fractional reductions made to only one dimension of a three-dimensional object such as a measuring vessel radically changes its overall shape: either from too thin and wide to too long and narrow, in the first instance, or from too tall and thin to too short and squat, in the second. The accuracy of measurement attainable with such a utensil also suffers greatly at the thin or squat end of the scale. A playing-card's-thickness difference, more or less, in a twelve inch tall, two cup measurement of flour would hardly be noticeable in a recipe. That same playing-card's-thickness difference, however, would represent a doubling of the amount of salt, from one eighth of a teaspoon to one fourth of a teaspoon, enough to ruin the recipe.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,125,699 to Molenaar discloses an adjustable measuring spoon having a swinging or pivoting gate (23) that can be pivoted about a pivot (51) to five different positions to adjust the size of the measuring bowl for fractional measurements of a teaspoon up to a tablespoon. U.S. Pat. No. 7,503,212 to Dalla Piazza et al. discloses an adjustable measuring scoop (1) having a movable partition (21) rotatably connected to a handle insert (32) on an axle (22) so that the partition (21) can be moved upwardly toward or downwardly away from the opening of the bucket (2) of the scoop (1).
Whereas in both of the previously mentioned generic forms, where a linear change in the position of the adjustable back wall or floor was directly proportional to a change in volume, in both of these referenced patents it is the angular displacement of the gate (23) or partition (21) that is directly proportional to the change in volume. The aforementioned problems remain unsolved by these innovations.
These and all other referenced patents and applications are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety. Furthermore, where a definition or use of a term in a reference that is incorporated by reference herein is inconsistent or contrary to the definition of that term provided herein, the definition of that term provided herein applies and the definition of that term in the reference does not apply.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,530,722 to Miller et al. discloses a recipe measuring utensil in which a reciprocally adjusted scale is employed that allows a cook to prepare a larger or smaller yield of baked goods or more or fewer servings of a dish than indicated in a recipe without having to consult a conversion chart or calculate adjusted fractional measurements. Putting this clever idea into practice, however, would require providing a serviceable range of perhaps a half dozen or more conversion factors—from the doubling of the yield of a recipe to the fractional reduction to a single serving of a recipe originally intended to serve six. This would involve providing either a multitude of individual measuring cups arranged in color-coded sets; a single clear glass cup covered in an illegible jumble of diminishingly small measuring scales; a large number of adjustable measuring cups and spoons or some combination thereof. The range-of-measurement problem has now been vastly compounded, even if one reduces the range to an upper limit of one cup. The range of volumes required to provide a complete set of measuring vessels has increased sixfold: with volumes ranging from one forty-eighth of a teaspoon to two cups. The largest measured volume is now four thousand six hundred and eight times greater than the smallest.
The foundational axioms of solid geometry seem to have stymied whatever efforts there may have been to solve the persistent problem of how to expand the functional range and accuracy of an adjustable volumetric measuring utensil. The problem has been addressed in part by providing a set of multiple utensils for measuring subsets of ingredients, segregated by relative volume and type, including providing separate measuring cups and spoons for liquid ingredients and for dry ingredients. As anyone who has shared a kitchen with another cook can attest, crucial members of such sets tend to get separated and mislaid, often for years at a time.
Thus, there remains a considerable need for devices and methods that can provide improvements in some aspects of the range, accuracy, multiplicity of function, and ease-of-use of adjustable volumetric measuring utensils.